A Quarter for a Kiss (11 page)

Fortunately, during the daytime hours, Tom and I seemed to have developed a sort of tag team approach to chastity—just when he was feeling weakest, I would be strong, and vice versa. Once hands or thoughts began to wander, that’s when we knew it was time to go out and do something constructive to clear our minds and occupy our bodies. It was no wonder I had learned to mountain climb in a mere three weeks’ time! Tom was getting to be a pretty good canoer too.

“It’s tag team time,” I whispered now, leaning back into the caresses of his hands.

“I know,” he moaned, shifting forward to wrap his arms around me, his breath sweet and warm against the back of my neck.

I realized I would have to be the strong one this time, and so finally, reluctantly, I pulled away.

“You rest here,” I whispered. “I’ll find somewhere down the hall.”

He let me go with a deep groan.

“And what’s to stop me from following you there?”

I stood and smoothed my hair and then gave him a smile.

“You know the answer to that question as well as I do,” I said.

Leaving him on the couch, I found one of the back bedrooms and opened a window. What we had to remember, what we had to keep telling ourselves, was that even though we were alone together, we were never completely alone. Our Savior was always watching, and He’s the one to whom we were both accountable.

A fresh ocean breeze swept into the room, and I lay down across the bed, exhausted. Despite all that had just happened, I felt myself slipping into sleep almost immediately. I closed my eyes, inhaling the smell of the sea.

Slowly, I became aware of a hand on my arm, gently shaking me. The light in the room was soft and shadowed, and it took a few seconds to remember where I was. Tom was there, sitting on the side of the bed, saying my name.

“What time is it?” I asked, sitting up.

“Almost seven,” he replied.

We had slept much longer than either of us had intended. He stood as I slid my legs to the edge of the bed, trying to clear my foggy brain.

“I’m really sorry about earlier,” he said. “I wasn’t thinking straight.”

“It’s okay,” I replied, smiling up at him. “We’ve had a tough day.”

I went to the bathroom and splashed some water on my face. What I really needed was a nice, long shower. I looked at my reflection in the mirror. A very pale, very tired Callie looked back at me. Using the few items I carried in my purse, I tried to freshen up, smoothing my hair and putting on a bit of mascara and a dab of lipstick. I took a deep breath and let it out, wondering when I could get an entire night’s sleep.

When I returned to the living room, Tom was standing at the door, jiggling his keys. He seemed to have pulled himself together also, managing to finger-comb his dark hair into place.

“Let’s go back over to Stella’s,” he said, looking somber, “and see what’s up there.”

He had closed and locked all of the windows, so I locked the door, stashed the key under the flowerpot, and followed him down the sidewalk to Stella’s unit.

It was empty, but the cleaners had left a bill for their services on the kitchen counter. “Sid’s Glass” had also shown up and replaced the broken window, as their bill sat on the table next to that of the cleaners.

“Poor Stella,” I said, putting down the note. “Imagine having to deal with this while your husband clings to life in the hospital.”

“You should probably get down there,” Tom said. “I’m sure she’s wondering what’s going on with us.”

“I don’t think we should tell her much about what we’ve learned,” I said, thinking of the more intimate details of this case. “Not yet, anyway.”

“Whatever you think’s best.”

“I also don’t know how much we should tell the police, either,” I said. “Some of the things Eli did in his investigation aren’t exactly—”

“For now, we don’t tell the police a thing,” Tom interrupted. “Let them work the case from their own angles.”

He was acting odd, almost antsy, still jingling his keys. I wanted to talk, but something in his face was closed off to me. Instead, I reached for his hand.

He squeezed mine in return but then let it go and gestured toward the door.

“Come on,” he said. “I’ll drop you at the hospital so you can sit for a while with Stella.”

“Then where are you going?” I asked.

He looked away.

“I have to make a phone call,” he said finally.

“A phone call?” I asked. “Why don’t you make it here before we go?”

He shook his head, not meeting my eyes.

“I need to make a call on a secure line.”

I studied his face for a moment, trying to understand what he was telling me. Secure, as in private?

Or digitally secure, as in scrambled?

“And where will you go to make this phone call?” I asked slowly. “Is this regarding Eli’s situation or something of your own?”

He looked at me for a long moment.

“Both,” he replied finally. “I have to make a digitally scrambled call, Callie, which means going somewhere that has that type of telephone equipment.”

“Like where?”

“Like a local FBI office, maybe, or a military base. Something like that.”

“You should try the Kennedy Space Center,” I said. “It’s not far from here. I bet they could help you.”

“Good idea. Either way, this is not a call I can make on just any telephone. And I’m sorry, but you can’t come with me.”

There it was. Laid out for me, plain and simple. Except I didn’t understand it one bit.

From the set of his chin, I could tell the conversation was over for now. Without responding, I picked up my purse and walked past him to the car.

We didn’t speak on the drive. When we pulled under the front awning of the hospital, I reached for the file, but Tom put his hand on it.

“I’ll keep it for now,” he said.

We sat there with the engine idling. I removed my hand and placed it on my lap.

“How long will you be gone?” I asked evenly.

“I’m not sure,” he replied. “As long as it takes. But I’ll pick you up when I’m finished.”

I nodded, a part of me wanting to reach out and grab his shirt by the collar and shake the truth out of him. Instead I opened the door and got out.

“Take as long as you want,” I said, shutting the door a little harder than I probably needed to. Then I turned and walked into the hospital as quickly as my legs would carry me—uncertain if my overriding emotion was one of anger, hurt, or fear.

Eleven

Once inside the hospital, I walked across the lobby, around a corner, and then doubled back and hid behind a large plant. I watched Tom’s rental pull out of the hospital parking lot onto the road. I quickly ran back outside, thinking that if there were a cab anywhere in the vicinity, I would jump in and say “Follow that car!”

Unfortunately, no cabs were to be seen. I stood there a moment on the pavement and watched Tom’s car disappear around a corner. Suddenly I decided I was now ready to cross that line in the sand.

What was it he had said to me that time he caught me digging around?
You can investigate me or you can work for me, but you cannot do both
. I wondered what he would say if I investigated him now.

Half of me knew that would be wrong. Tom was a good man, and if there were secrets in his life, they were necessary secrets. The other half of me burned to know what it was that connected Tom with this case, and I didn’t care what it would take to get some answers. I didn’t have much time, and I didn’t have many resources, but I thought if I could spend at least one hour searching for the connection, and if I could find something, it would shed a whole new light on what was going on. I told myself that if something about Tom had an impact on this case with Eli, then I had the right to know what that was.

I didn’t have my laptop with me, but the woman at the hospital information desk said a public library was a few miles away. She offered to call a cab, and I waited for it under the portico out front.

By the time I got to the library, it was 30 minutes to closing time. At least it was a nice facility, very clean, with ample space for bookshelves and groupings of chairs. Fortunately, I didn’t need a library card to use the computers. I chose the one in a back corner where I could use it without anyone seeing what I was doing, and then I got down to business.

I worked quickly, hoping to get as much information as I could in the time I had. I knew that any number of my actions could somehow trip Tom’s security and alert him to what I was doing. At this point I didn’t care. I told myself that my main concern here was Eli. I would do anything to figure out exactly what was going on.

I started with a simple Google search for “Tom Bennett,” but it didn’t do me much good. As I had feared, the name was just too common. My search netted more than 2 million hits, far more than I would ever have time to go through one by one to weed out the particular Tom Bennett I was interested in.

Just in case, I clicked through the first few pages’ worth of links, but none of them panned out. Instead, I found myself viewing websites about artists and lawyers and even a commissioner—all named Tom Bennett. All not him. I tried again with “Thomas Bennett,” but it simply returned more of the same.

Sitting back in my chair, I decided to type “Tom Bennett” along with certain keywords to pull up only articles that featured his name
plus
the additional word or words. I tried “Tom Bennett + Eli Gold.” “Tom Bennett + NSA.” “Tom Bennett + spy.” “Tom Bennett + Russia.” All of my entries netted a lot of sites to wade through but no true hits.

It wasn’t until I tried “Tom Bennett + computer” that I got something that caught my eye.

It was from an old archived magazine article about a famous cryptographer who created an unbreakable e-mail computer encryption program. With the article was a photo of a group of people, and the caption on the photo said “Water walkers—the best and the brightest.” It went on to list the names of the people in the photo, including Tom Bennett. I would’ve thought it was another useless site except that there, in the picture, was a younger Tom—
my
Tom—looking back at me.

“Water walkers?” I whispered. I had never heard that term.

Suddenly, the loudspeaker announced that the library would be closing in ten minutes. I had spent 20 minutes finding something, and now they were telling me to wrap it up!

I skimmed the article, and what I read made my heart pound.

Apparently, “water walker” was a cryptology term for a person who seemed to know exactly what direction to take when breaking a secret code. Like walking on water, they seemed to perform miracles in code-breaking, almost effortlessly.

Was Tom really a water walker, a breaker of secret codes?

I sat back in my chair and thought for a moment. I didn’t know all that much about cryptology. I knew it was a science that dated back thousands of years but one that had changed drastically with the advent of computers. I knew that the World War II allied code breakers were credited with shortening the war when they finally broke the great German code, Enigma. I knew that even in times of peace the government had legions of code breakers working around the clock to decipher messages from across the globe. But that was about all I knew.

Time was running short, too short to sit and simply think, so with one eye on the clock, I clicked on the links that were attached to the article. I finally hit pay dirt on the third one.

It was an article from a 1996 issue of
Time
magazine, a list of the 25 most influential people on the internet. “Most of these people you’ve never heard of…” the article began, “but rest assured they are the key movers and shakers of the internet revolution.” The introductory paragraphs were followed by a photo and a short profile of each person. There, at number 19, was Tom Bennett. Beside his name was the heading “Crypto Genius.”

“The library will be closing in five minutes,” the voice on the loudspeaker said. Looking up, I saw a library employee headed my way, trying to catch my eye. My time was up.

I clicked “Print” and hoped this computer allowed printing. Sure enough, there was a small printer next to the machine, and after a moment it sprang to life.

“I’m sorry, you’ll have to get off the computer now,” the woman said to me sweetly. “We’ll reopen again at nine o’clock Monday morning.”

“How do I pay for this?” I asked, pointing to the printer.

“Ten cents a page. You can pay at the desk,” she said before walking away.

When the printing was finished, I removed my pages, clicked off the website, and went to the front counter to fork over 60 cents. From the corner of my eye, I watched the employee return to the computers and shut them down. Then I folded the pages I had printed into thirds and walked out into the street.

It was growing dark, too dark to stand there and read the entire article, though I desperately wanted to. I called the cab company on my cell phone, and while I waited for them to pick me up, I read as much as I could. My heart quickened as I reached the part about Tom:

19. Tom Bennett, Crypto Genius